You know what the several-thousand-member-strong Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences liked this year? The same movies everybody else did! No, really! The King's Speech led the 83rd annual Academy Awards nominations with 12 nods overall. True Grit followed close behind with 10, and then came The Social Network and Inception with eight a piece. Those four movies, as well as the other six nominated for Best Picture, have been nominated pretty much everywhere else, so the Academy was apparently feeling largely agreeable this year.
Unlike last year, with The Blind Side and A Serious Man hanging out in the Best Picture category with only one other nomination to show for it, every Best Picture nominee this year boasts at least four nominations total, which means there were a few mild surprises, like John Hawkes hanging on for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Winter's Bone or 127 Hours doing surprisingly well in the technical categories. But if you weren't a Best Picture nominee? Well, you were pretty much screwed, with highly acclaimed movies like Blue Valentine and Another Year each scoring only one nomination a piece. As a further sign of just how top-heavy the list is this year, the most-nominated film without a Best Picture nomination is that all-time classic Alice In Wonderland, which scored three nominations for its art direction, costume design, and visual effects.
There were snubs, of course, with the biggest probably being Inception missing out for its editing and for Christopher Nolan's direction. (Nolan will have to be content with a screenplay nomination.) But Andrew Garfield also missed out for being the one seemingly nice guy in The Social Network, and Ryan Gosling couldn't match onscreen wife, Michelle Williams, with a Blue Valentine nod, making this approximately the 500th time Ryan Gosling has missed an expected nomination in favor of whoever happened to capture Julia Roberts' fancy that year. And that one guy you know who's always raving about how fucking awesome The Town was will be saddened that only Jeremy Renner could manage a nomination from the well-regarded film. Two films from former Academy favorites, Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer and Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, were completely overlooked.
Still, there's enough awesomely weird stuff around the edges this year to go around. Exit Through The Gift Shop, Dogtooth, and The Illusionist are ALL Oscar nominees now. Winter's Bone, The A.V. Club's number one movie of 2010, pulled in four nominations. And you can add Unstoppable, Salt, and The Wolfman to the list of random movies that got one nomination in a technical category and can, thus, call themselves Oscar-nominated films, a proud company that includes Benji and the 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young. Also, Barney's Version somehow got a nomination for makeup, and somebody somewhere made a movie called The Gruffalo (which will hopefully be introduced by Supporting Actor nominee Mark Ruffalo). So there's that!
The full list of nominees follows.
Best Picture:
127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King's Speech
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone
Best Director:
Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, True Grit
David Fincher, The Social Network
Tom Hooper, The King's Speech
David O. Russell, The Fighter